Artisan was founded in 2024 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Sam Stallings and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. Based in San Francisco, the company's premise is to build 'AI employees' that handle entire go-to-market functions, beginning with outbound sales development.
Its first agent, Ava, acts as a virtual business development representative: she sources and researches prospects from large B2B datasets, drafts highly personalized cold emails designed to minimize hallucination, and runs multi-step follow-up sequences automatically. Artisan pairs the agent with the surrounding data and deliverability infrastructure sales teams need, positioning Ava as a replacement for much of the manual SDR workflow rather than a point tool.
Artisan drew outsized attention for its 'Stop Hiring Humans' billboard campaign, which became a lightning rod in the debate about AI replacing knowledge work. Despite the slogan, the company employs dozens of people and has continued hiring. By its Series A it reported roughly 250 paying customers and around $5 million in annual recurring revenue, and outlined additional agents in development, including Aaron for inbound and Aria for meeting management.
In April 2025 Artisan raised a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, and Fellows Fund. Combined with a $12 million seed round in September 2024, total disclosed funding stands at about $37 million.